- Sep 28, 2001
- 8,464
- 155
- 106
We have this ancient "Media PC" which merely serves the purpose for file sharing over the network and playing Movies on the big screen.
This PC is so ancient, it has a AMD 3500+, 1GB Memory and some old HDs. Two years or so ago I put an AMD 4350 card in it since this is a good Multimedia graphics card for that purpose.
For YEARS, I ran XP on the machine and didn't even think about changing to Win7, mainly because of the only 1GB ram and the purpose of the machine.
Well for some reason the XP install was trashed two days ago and I unsuccessfully tried to restore it, so at some point I just said *** it and installed Win 7 X86 Ultimate on it.
Yes, Ultimate, not some "tiny" or some "tweaked, mini Win7" version. (All other PCs here already have Win7 on them).
It was ENTIRELY worth it and the PC does in fact seem much faster and much, much more reliable. Super fast boot too! I was really thinking that Win7 would slow the machine down respective initially thought that it might not work at all with only 1GB Ram.
What I did
* ....changed to a Basic theme without Aero.
* removed/disabled cr@p like Homegroups, Gadgets and most "features" which come with Win7.
* disabled some services where I know I don't need them
What's great is not only that the PC is snappier and more reliable, also some old but cool programs (some which cause problems on Win7 x64), such as rmclock (a tool which clocks down the CPU depending on CPU usage) all works flawlessly as they did before in XP.
It just made me realize again what a really sharp OS Win7 is and there is A TON to tweak so it can even run on very, very old hardware where I didn't even think of that it would make sense to install Win7 on it.
PS: The PC also has some ancient opticals and the DVD pukes out and is not reliable, so what I did made a bootable USB stick with Win7 using PowerISO. Absolutely fantastic, simply loaded PowerISO, selected "make a bootable USB stick" and the Win7 ISO...very cool and easy.
This PC is so ancient, it has a AMD 3500+, 1GB Memory and some old HDs. Two years or so ago I put an AMD 4350 card in it since this is a good Multimedia graphics card for that purpose.
For YEARS, I ran XP on the machine and didn't even think about changing to Win7, mainly because of the only 1GB ram and the purpose of the machine.
Well for some reason the XP install was trashed two days ago and I unsuccessfully tried to restore it, so at some point I just said *** it and installed Win 7 X86 Ultimate on it.
Yes, Ultimate, not some "tiny" or some "tweaked, mini Win7" version. (All other PCs here already have Win7 on them).
It was ENTIRELY worth it and the PC does in fact seem much faster and much, much more reliable. Super fast boot too! I was really thinking that Win7 would slow the machine down respective initially thought that it might not work at all with only 1GB Ram.
What I did
* ....changed to a Basic theme without Aero.
* removed/disabled cr@p like Homegroups, Gadgets and most "features" which come with Win7.
* disabled some services where I know I don't need them
What's great is not only that the PC is snappier and more reliable, also some old but cool programs (some which cause problems on Win7 x64), such as rmclock (a tool which clocks down the CPU depending on CPU usage) all works flawlessly as they did before in XP.
It just made me realize again what a really sharp OS Win7 is and there is A TON to tweak so it can even run on very, very old hardware where I didn't even think of that it would make sense to install Win7 on it.
PS: The PC also has some ancient opticals and the DVD pukes out and is not reliable, so what I did made a bootable USB stick with Win7 using PowerISO. Absolutely fantastic, simply loaded PowerISO, selected "make a bootable USB stick" and the Win7 ISO...very cool and easy.
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